In what respect, do you reckon, is it possible to speak of half the human race as a lump; to generalise on its behalf and claim to speak for it? Women constitute half the population, more than half of most Catholic congregations and yet there remains an astonishing willingness on the part of feminists and would-be feminists to speak for an entire sex. Being one of that half, can I just say that I can speak for myself, thank you? And in the matter at issue in the English and Welsh Church just now, whether to use the translation of the Bible authorised by the bishops, the ESV, which Gerald O’ Collins criticises in this issue, and this paper’s editorial criticised in the last, for its use of non-inclusive language, I’m with the bishops.

Plainly, the solution to all our problems is to brush up our Greek so as to get to the root of the text without intermediaries, and in my case this will involve quite a bit of spadework, since I have to have an actual Greek-English alphabet to hand and a Liddell and Scott dictionary before I can read the simplest words. As for Hebrew, forget it. But quite a lot of the present bad temper would be saved if we could discuss the actual text and the meanings of words rather than the political implications of English usage. And in particular, we get endlessly worked up about the historical circumstance that we talk in English about “mankind” rather than “humankind”, “men” rather than “people”. In German, you get round the problem with the word mensch rather than mann, although you still have difficulties, I suppose, with the possessive. Latin has homo rather than vir; Greek has anthropos rather than andres.